


Strawberry Ice Cream

by Charlie_Parker



Category: John Wick (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 22:26:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14680725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charlie_Parker/pseuds/Charlie_Parker
Summary: What happens when John Wick is assigned as the personal security detail of the daughter and heiress of the Continental legacy?





	1. Strawberry Ice Cream

“You need to relax.” A small smile graced your lips as the creamy sweetness of your favorite ice cream graced your tastebuds.   
“You’re not careful enough. I have to be for you.” John spoke out of the corner of his mouth. He looked humorously out of place in the very pink ice cream shop you had stopped by. Your bodyguard’s eyes scanned the room, right arm ready to lunge for his gun.  
“I’ve been coming here for years, John. It’s safe.”  
“If I wanted to kill you-”  
“Which I’m sure is a tempting idea to you.”  
“If I wanted to kill you,” he repeated, turning his head to make sure you were looking into his intense gaze “I would go some place you wouldn’t think to feel scared of. Easier target is the one that doesn’t know it’s a target.”  
You tilted your head, smiling dreamily at him “How do you figure?”  
“Experience. Lots of it.”  
Of course you knew of his reputation. People in need of bodyguards were often aware of the Underground and of John Wick. Even more so, your father was the owner of the Continental, John had seen you grow up. That didn’t stop your incessant flirting. Whether out of actual interest in you or professionalism, he never answered your flirts with hostility. Part of him enjoyed the playful banter. Your father had to remind you often enough that John was there to protect you from any threat and continuing to try to get into his pants was making his job more difficult than it should be.  
“Let me buy you a scoop.” You smiled.  
“That’s not necessary.”  
“I know. But I want to. I’m also curious as to what kind of ice cream John Wick likes.”  
He rose a brow and looked back at you, having gone back to his scoping earlier. “Why’s that?”  
“I can never fill out Buzzfeed quizzes for you.” You frowned “I can’t tell if you’re more a chocolate or a vanilla guy.”  
“Strawberry.” A half hidden humored smile on his lips.  
“You freak!” You teased, hitting his arm playfully with a laugh.  
“Really?” He laughed and made a pointed look at your ice cream as if to say “Oh, I’m the freak?”  
“Yes, really. It’s a fruit. Nut up and get a sorbet.”  
“Sherbert.” He corrected off the cuff.  
“And to say that I liked you.” You shook your head with false wistfulness.   
John’s smile infected his entire face, from the wrinkles at the corner of his almond shaped brown eyes to the soft redness in his cheeks. “Sherbert is the deal breaker.”  
“The ultimate deal breaker.”  
“Y/N, do you know what I do for a living?”  
“Yeah, but I can tolerate that. It’s really just the sherbert.”  
“What if I told you I hate dogs.”  
“You liar.” You snorted out a laugh, shaking your head.  
“No, I’m serious. I hate dogs.”  
“No you don’t.”  
“How would you know?”  
“Every time we walk by a dog, you look at it and give it a smile if it looks back at you. I see you, Wick. You’re not as sly as you think you are.”  
“Okay, that’s fair.”  
By the end of the day, John walked you back to your penthouse in the Continental (as if the owner’s daughter would live in a suite). Leaning against your door, you reached out to take his hand as he began walking away. Your fingers caught his sleeve and he looked back at you “Yes, Y/N?”  
“You did a good job today.” Your smile was warm, your eyes tired.  
“You…” John approached you, closing the distance “you weren’t horrible today.”  
“That dastardly smile is going to kill me. Why don’t you come into my room? I have strawberry...sorbet.”  
“That doesn’t sound likely.”  
“Only one way to find out.” You clenched your jaw shut to suppress a yawn, but John saw the small flexing of those jaw muscles.  
His face leaned down to yours and you felt the scratching of the stubble of his beard against your jawline as he reached over to kiss your cheek “Goodnight, Y/N.” The breath of his voice tingled the hairs at the back of your neck.  
“Goodnight, John.” When he began to pull back, you had turned your head to kiss his cheek and in the process caught the corner of his lips. A short intake of breath through his nose, his heart beating out of his chest, and a turn of his head towards you turned the chaste goodnight kiss into a tender moment lost in time.  
When he pulled away, the words left you on your first exhale “You’re still wrong about sherbert.”  
“You might actually be the worst person I’ve ever had to work around.” He laughed a little, allowing you a few seconds of laughter before diving into another kiss. This one bookmarked itself into your memory. He had you pressed against the door with your hands in his dark hair. As if he was shocked into remembering, he pulled away, giving you enough space for him to fix his suit and collar. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gave a curt nod before walking away, face burning and long strides to cover distance away from you.  
The smile you fell asleep with that night promised you that you would try again tomorrow.


	2. Simple Twist of Fate

“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”  
“I don’t want to.”   
“I mean, we could...”  
“Y/N-”  
“It wouldn’t be off the table.”  
“That’s really not necessary.”  
“John, I’m just saying,”  
“What I did was ridiculously inappropriate, Y/N.”  
“You didn’t do anything without my consent, John.” Your hand found his upper arm, biceps involuntarily flexing.   
His head bowed as he spoke your name, quietly, to himself. The line of his morality was usually straight as an arrow from his perspective. A clear GPS line on his screen. You blurred everything out for him. If you both wanted to touch each other, to feel each other’s skin against the other’s, what was he waiting for? Then there was the question of your father. He had hired John to keep you safe. Could he do that when you blinded him in his judgment? Then again, your persistence threatened his vigilance constantly. Then there was the question of who you were. He had seen you grow up in the background of the Continental. What kind of creepy old man did that make him? And if he really did have feelings for you, why was he so concerned with being seen as such?  
“Can you understand if I’m not entirely sure of what I’m doing?”  
Your eyebrows knit together and you leaned back in the festively colored chair of the taco restaurant you had decided to stop by for dinner while he was watching you. Your weird idea of a date.   
“Most people have no idea what they’re doing. It’s an honest shot in the dark. Sometimes it ends out finding the right target. Yeah,” You exhaled deeply and nodded “I can understand why that makes you uncomfortable.” He was used to shooting with the guarantee of a sure shot on his target. Noticing the waiter coming to take your order, you nudged your menu towards him.  
“Y/N, I’m fine.”  
“It’s my treat.” You shrugged and twirled a finger into your hair, looking around the room nonchalantly.   
When you had both finished your meals, making fun of the other’s mess from the overloaded tacos, you threw a few bills onto the table and got up. “I want to go take a walk in the park.”  
“Y/N,” John’s voice trailed off as he looked up at you. He knew what you were doing.  
“Come on, I’ve never been at this time.”  
“It’s gonna be cold.”  
“That’s why you’re here, right?” The smile you gave him over your shoulder made his heart skip a beat.  
“Okay.”  
“Okay?” Your smile grew and you offered your hand for him to hold as he stood from his chair.  
“Sure.”  
“Alright then. Let’s go. Before I remember when that salsa came out of your nose.”   
“Hey! That really hurt!”  
“I’ve literally never seen someone eat a taco that badly. Had you seen a taco before?” His laughs spurred your teases, leaning into each other’s touches as you walked through the park on the side of the canal, the city lights recreating a Van Gogh in live action.   
You two had walked out of the park fifteen minutes ago, idling along the mostly closed shops along the canal, when his watch beeped. “That’s the end of my shift.” He had to let go of your hand to press down on a small button along the rim of his wristwatch.   
“We’re some ways off from the Continental.” You looked off in its direction, the location veiled by building upon building of a metropolitan jungle.  
“It’s late…” Something in his voice and the way he looked at you told you he wasn’t just stating the obvious.  
“It is...quite...late.” Your voice drawled and your fingertips left his hand to trail up his arm, leaving only one hand to entwine your fingers with his. Was there such a thing as never being close enough? You might be the first to find out with him. Your suggestion took the courage of fifty Spartans hammering in your chest “There’s always the Super 8 a few bloc-” In the end, you never finished your phrase, his lips silencing yours.  
He nodded, his breath taken from the kiss that lasted both forever and not long enough. The next few minutes walking to the motel, its neon lights brazen against the inky backdrop of city outskirts and sky, were asphyxiating. You don’t even remember paying for the room.   
All that remained from the morning after was your bare back hitting the mattress,  
The scratch of his nails along your skin as they took off your clothes,  
Your fingers twisting through strands of raven black hair,  
The friction of his beard between your thighs,  
The popping of buttons being thrown across the floor from the ripping open of his shirt,  
The creaking of the cheap iron wrought bed,  
His groans of effort and ecstasy,  
Your cries of need and accomplishment,  
The headboard snapping against the wall,  
Your collective moans of completion.  
That’s all there was left when you woke up. Memories and an empty bed.


	3. Long Live the Queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A considerable tonal shift

The week following you and John’s escapade was unexpectedly monotonous. Neither of you spared each other a word or a look more than necessary. John was brisker in his manners than usual, and it all felt weird– like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except you too had been replaced. You felt too out of place to say anything to him you usually would. Had you gone too far?  
That week passed by slowly, and soon enough the weeks sped up to their natural time, gone in the blink of an eye. Before either of you knew it, John hadn’t been your bodyguard for over five years. Birthdays passed, so did weddings, retirement parties, and funerals. Everything passed by like a movie montage, numb to the winds of time whipping through your hair and chilling your skin.  
It was ten years post Mistake that you found yourself walking up to your father to your family’s hotel’s rooftop private garden. Your phone was shaking in your hand, manicured hands springing from a uniform that could only say “I’m the boss”. You had mutated from the reckless flirt to the heiress, the title having crept up on you after your father’s first stroke. “When did you decide this?” Your voice shook as Winston turned around to face you, hands folded behind back holding flower cutters and blood-red roses.  
“After he broke the rules, Y/N.”  
“Fuck the rules.” Your vision was clouding, blinking furiously to keep up with the onslaught of unshed tears.  
“Don’t be vindictive, darling. This is what we do. Since the time of your great-grandmother who built this empire. If we don’t referee this world, it falls apart before our eyes.” He sat down, placing the rose cutters and flowers on the table and offering a glass of lemonade– an olive branch or a comfort blanket. It was up to you to chose.  
You chose to sit down next to him “He’s been good to us for years.” You were praying that the sob that had woven itself between your words had only been audible to you.  
“Which is why I gave him some warning.”  
“Oh yeah? So he got to live one hour longer, scared for his life!” The chair you pushed back to stand abruptly collapsed behind you. You roughly shoved your wet cheek with your fist and sniffled loudly.  
“Y/N, this is unbecoming. Sit down. Do you think it was easy for me?”  
“He was like a son to you!”  
“Exactly. Now, sit down. Come here.” Your father opened his arms and you, suddenly nine years old again, cried into his arms with your knees scraping the floor.  
“I dare say it was more difficult to send the order for John than it was for your mother.”  
The words sounded like someone was saying them to you while you were underwater. You choked on your sob and pulled away to look up at your father. Your voice broke, “My mother?”  
“Come now, you must have known before.”  
“You never told me that’s what happened.”  
“You were nine years old, darling. I couldn’t very well tell you the truth.”  
“My mother?” Your chest was caving in on itself and blinking away the tears were getting all too easy as your eyes dried and your blood rushed through your entire body. You didn’t even hear whatever your father’s last words were, the blood rush invading your audition as garden scissors penetrated his chest. Your eyes didn’t tear away from his as his spirit left them, refusing to be distracted by the sprouting stains of crimson on his button-down shirt. You crouched on your knees by your father, one hand petrified around the grip of your father’s killer. Your eyes, the same as your mother’s, were the sight he took with him to the afterlife.  
A voice behind you cut through your reflective silence. “Ma’am? Your father’s next appointment is waiting in the lobby. What should we tell them?”  
You stood, a veritable Jackson Pollock of patricide decorating your face and clothes. “Let them wait.” Your voice came out strong. Wiping away the blood from your lips with the pad of your thumb, you told the assistant nervously pacing “Get me a towel, Marty, please.”  
“Ma’am,”  
“Yes?”  
“I don’t think a towel is going to work very well.”  
Your heels clicked around in the expanding pool of blood. You were beginning to become more aware of who was at the epicenter of the fountain. “Then call the exterminators.” As soon as you were alone with the corpse, you fell on to a bench and covered your mouth with your hands that felt so foreign to scream into.  
The funeral happened that week, the best mortuary beauticians in New York had done their work well. Your heinous crime was just a rumor no one dared ask the queen of the underworld about. He was buried next to your mother for appearances. The lower his casket was brought to your mother’s, the sicker you felt.  
Turning away from the event, you caught a glimpse of a shadow by a tree five feet behind the ceremony. Every step you took away from the sunlit event, you felt the stone in your stomach get heavier. Under the cool shadow behind the tree trunk, you found your gaze meeting that familiar warm chocolate gaze “John.”  
“Y/N. I’m sorry for your loss.”  
“So am I.” You nodded, your grip on the black sun umbrella perched on your shoulder tightening.  
“If there’s anything I can do-”  
“Come back.”  
“You know I can’t.”  
“You can. I can lift the ban. Just need to sign the papers and I’m in charge.”  
“They’re going to let you? With all the speculation?”  
“It’s mine. It’s in the will since his first stroke. Doesn’t matter if I killed him.”  
“So it’s true.”  
You shifted uncomfortably, your conversational partner standing steady. “It is.”  
“Why?”  
“He killed my mother.”  
“Everyone knew that.”  
“I didn’t!” You seethed, leaning closer with venom in your gaze.  
“Is that why you killed him then? Because you didn’t know?”  
Your face became placid as you leaned back, covering your mouth as you did years ago. Was it because he never told you? Was it because he killed your mother? Or was it for John? Your mind was spiraling as you thought: Dear God, did I just kill my father for nothing? “I don’t know, John. I can’t do this. I’m going fucking crazy!” You whispered, pacing in tight circles.  
“Hey. No. Come here.” John shook his head and pulled you closer, your senses accosted by the familiar comfort.  
You don’t even remember the end of your father’s funeral. Perhaps because you weren’t there. Looking back a few hours later in your drinking room, you couldn’t remember if you’d even sprinkled the bit of dirt on his casket. “The papers are all signed.” You spoke through the silence, looking up at John as he reminisced about the picture frames decorating around packed full bookcases.  
“Good.” He nodded “You’re untouchable now.”  
“And so are you. As of two hours ago, the Continental has abolished your excommunication and any bounties against you since it was originally declared.”  
“Thank you.”  
You hummed in response, nodding as your gaze fell on the kindled fire in the hearth. From where you were sitting it looked a lot like the flames of Hell. “I’m damned.”  
“Yeah.” John made his way over to you, a glass of bourbon in one hand “But you’ll get used to it. We all do.” He knelt at your legs, not so much unlike the way you had to your father.  
“Killing gets easy, doesn’t it?”  
“It gets fun. It’s never easy.”  
“God, John,” A mirthful laugh escaped your lips as you took the bourbon from his hand and took a sip “that’s fucking pitiful.”  
“Yeah, it is.” He took the glass back from you and finished off the drink with a quick swig.  
A silence took over both of you, occupied by the crackling of the damned fire. You shook your head “I can’t do it without you.”  
“You could.”  
“Yeah.” You nodded “I could. But I don’t want to.”  
“You may have to order me killed one day.”  
“Not a chance. You’re all I have left. I’d burn this place down first.” You stated, a simple fact you’d both known; maybe since you had first laid eyes on each other.


End file.
